


Empty

by servantofclio



Series: Jocelyn Hawke [3]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-18 05:00:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18113783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/servantofclio/pseuds/servantofclio
Summary: One night, perhaps a week after Hawke’s mother died, Varric showed up at her door with a bottle of brandy and two glasses.





	Empty

One night, perhaps a week after Hawke’s mother died, Varric showed up at her door with a bottle of brandy and two glasses. “Hey, Hawke,” he said, as if everything were entirely ordinary.

Hawke stirred herself to watch, and to accept the glass he handed her. She’d worked her way through a few bottles from their own cellar for a few days, but neither drunkenness nor hangovers had quite offered the numbness she was after. In the days since, her world and her mind had narrowed. She slept, and when she woke she stared at the minute cracks and patterns on the floor, or the flames crackling, and let her mind go blank. Orana or Bodahn brought her trays of food, which she picked at. Sometimes one of her friends appeared to attempt a few words. Most of what they’d said, Hawke no longer remembered. She had a vague impression of platitudes and attempted comfort that all sunk into a black well at the bottom of her soul, along with the memories of her mother’s face, and all her other failures.

Varric, though, didn’t approach her in awkward stiffness, or look concerned that she was sitting on the floor of her chamber with her back propped against the bedstead. Bodahn must have let him in, probably on the idea that she should leave her room at some point. “Are you here to tell me I need to get myself together and get out of the house?” she inquired, watching him open the bottle. It might have been the longest statement she’d uttered all week.

“No.” Varric poured her a glass and himself another, and sat down on the floor beside her.

All right, then. It seemed rude to refuse, so she took the glass and drank. They both did, sipping as they sat in silence for a long time.

She could handle this, she reflected. He wasn’t asking how she felt, and she didn’t have to make any decisions about what to say.

Varric spoke only once Hawke had mostly drained her glass. “Did I ever tell you about my mother?” 

That was interesting enough to catch her attention. Varric never said much about his family. Hawke twisted sideways to give him a look. Varric seemed as he ever did: hair tied back, dressed in silk and leather, ink on his fingers. He looked ahead, not at her, showing her his profile. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe you did.”

“She never got over leaving Orzammar,” he said. “She was afraid of the sky. Kept all the windows covered with shutters, or heavy curtains. She hated the feel of wood, and always got stone furniture when she could get it. It was like living in a cave.” He reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. “When I was growing up, she was often poorly. We children weren’t to bother her, my father said, though the two of them argued loud enough that anyone in the house could hear. She hated going out, and worried constantly about strangers coming to the house.”

He fell quiet for long enough that Hawke found her voice, to fill the gap. “Strangers?”

“Anyone, really. She wasn’t too keen on elves or humans — too tall, she said, with no sense of how things should be. But she also thought surfacer dwarves were low-class and had no honor. Never mind that that’s exactly why my father had gotten himself exiled, at least according to the nobles of Orzammar. Their fighting got worse over the years. My parents took any excuse to pick at each other.”

Hawke tried, but she could hardly remember her parents quarreling at all. “She never thought of simply leaving?”

Varric’s laugh was dry and thin. “I don’t know if she thought of it. She didn’t do it, certainly. I don’t know if her family wouldn’t have her back, or if she didn’t want to leave Bartrand and me. She tried to be a good mother, in her way, but she always seemed…” He paused, frowning, and sipped again from his glass. “She seemed helpless,” he said finally. “Her health wasn’t good, she didn’t like going out, but she also didn’t trust the servants. She always thought they were going to steal, or put one over on us somehow. They weren’t dwarves, you see. They didn’t know their place, not like people born into their proper caste.”

Hawke snorted. “She would have been terribly confused by my family.”

“She would have been appalled by your family,” Varric agreed. “A young lady of good family choosing to run away and live as a peasant? Magic? Shocking, all of it.”

Hawke smirked a little, slouching down where she sat.

Varric went on: “When I was a little older, she stayed in her bed more and more. She’d never been very good at managing the household, but she stopped keeping track of things, so Bartrand or I had to take care of them. She drank too much. I figured out later that she drank as she lost her stone sense.”

Hawke winced. “I suppose it must have been hard to lose something like that,” she ventured.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had it.” Varric shook his head slightly. “She’d always been fragile. In her later years, she just seemed to fade. But she liked having someone read to her while she was resting. I made up stories for her.”

“Oh,” Hawke murmured, and could almost see it: the frail dwarf woman in her bed, windows shuttered to keep out the sky, and Varric at her side. “That was good of you.”

“It wasn’t all altruism,” Varric said. “For a while, she was my best audience. She was happy for me when my first book came out. Bartrand thought that penning tales wasn’t proper work for a dwarf. She liked all the stories I ever told her. Toward the end, she couldn’t keep track of the plot, but she still liked to hear them.”

He stopped talking, turning his attention to the brandy. The silence sat heavy between them. Hawke frowned, trying to figure out what she was meant to take from that story.

“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked finally.

Varric shrugged. “Losing parents is hard, even when the parent is hard, too.”

“Mother wasn’t…” Hawke set her teeth against her tongue, remembering a dozen recriminations. Some of them Varric had been present for, and probably remembered as well as Hawke herself did. Her mother had been often helpless, too, turning to Hawke for every hard decision and then sighing over the outcome.

And then there were Carver and Bethany…

It was too much to think of them too, and it seemed unfair to even remember of all those stupid petty slights and blames, with her mother hardly a week gone. Surely none of it mattered any more, and yet remembering her mother’s last moments made her feel more flayed than forgiven, all of the old stings torn open again.

“We were getting along rather well, the last few years,” she said at last. Her voice came out high and tight. She set her jaw and blinked rapidly against the tears filling her eyes. It was true; they’d let old discontents drop into the past and been easier with each other, with only the two of them.

“I know,” Varric said softly, and she was glad beyond words that he’d chosen not to point out the lapses in that statement.

“Anyway, no one deserved… _that_ ,” Hawke added. Her voice cracked, and she wished she could have scrubbed her brain scrubbed of what she’d seen down there.

“That’s for sure,” Varric said fervently. He topped off Hawke’s glass.

She drank, and sighed, leaning against Varric’s broad shoulder. It would be so nice to simply stay here forever, quiet and warm, with somebody who understood, even a little. Someone who knew what a wretched failure she was and didn’t seem to mind. Varric sighed too, and let her lean, solid and steady.

“I don’t… know… what to do now,” she said at last. She’d been supposed to take care of her family, and now all of them gone, with only her left to rattle around in this estate she’d never cared about. It felt too empty; _she_ felt empty, as though her organs had been replaced with hollow glass, and any little move might break them.

“You’ll come up with something, Hawke,” Varric said after a long while. “We always do.”

She sighed again, and settled in against his shoulder.


End file.
